Meta fined hundreds of thousands for plaintext password storage – Safety

The lead European Union privateness regulator fined social media large Meta 91 million euros ($147 million) for inadvertently storing some customers’ passwords with out safety or encryption.

The inquiry was opened 5 years in the past after Meta notified Eire’s Knowledge Safety Fee (DPC) that it had saved some passwords in plaintext.

Meta publicly acknowledged the incident on the time and the DPC mentioned the passwords weren’t made obtainable to exterior events.

“It’s extensively accepted that person passwords shouldn’t be saved in plaintext, contemplating the dangers of abuse that come up from individuals accessing such information,” Irish DPC Deputy Commissioner Graham Doyle mentioned in a press release.

The DPC is the lead EU regulator for many of the prime U.S. web companies as a result of location of their EU operations within the nation.

It has up to now fined Meta a complete of two.5 billion euros for breaches below the bloc’s Common Knowledge Safety Regulation’s (GDPR), launched in 2018, together with a file 1.2 billion euro effective in 2023 that Meta is interesting.